Being a so called TESOLer is having an
opportunity to be part of a dynamic community of professionals. Therefore, it is always a rewarding
experience to attend (and present at!) a TESOL Conference, and this year
couldn’t have been different. I knew in advance that I would have a chance to
attend presentations with Diane Larsen-Freeman, Douglas Brown and Penny Ur,
among others. In fact, there were so many different presentations with
interesting titles and renowned presenters that it was hard to choose what to
attend.
However, having read, studied and
used as reference Dr Douglas Brown’s books for so many years, it would be
inevitable not to share his presentation here. His My “top ten” list of mousetraps presentation
revolves around the “mousetraps” which
work very well in our profession.
He started his presentation by
asking the audience to think about the mousetraps
– “principles, methods and the kind of foundation stones” - we have been engaged
in during our professional lives. Dr Brown made us stop to think about the kind
of methodology we rely on in our teaching when we plan our classes. After a
brief review of his “Ten Commandments” (from 1990), the presenter stated that,
at the time, he simply pictured everything relatively unified in some kind of
Strategic Investment Mousetrap,
meaning that we teachers would get our students to invest in the language we
were teaching.
Then he wondered whether or not we were right to do so at the
time, however, what really mattered was that we were on the right track. From
then on, Dr. Brown stated that many things have changed, for there have been
lots of research for the past twenty-four years, and that there are now better mousetraps, showing the audience how our
profession has progressed in many positive ways. However, before starting to
talk about those “top ten” mousetraps,
he made a point of telling us that things have evolved, becoming simpler, but
not that the twelve principles from his well-known book Teaching by Principles (1993, 2000, 2007) don’t work anymore, for
they are still great principles; it’s just that researchers have improved on
them.
That being said, the presenter made it clear that those changes encompass
all the connections that researchers in the field have been making with
learners, for they revolve around what makes students successful and what makes
them interested in learning, not forgetting about all the global implications
of teaching English worldwide. Based on
that, he compared the traditional mousetraps
to the better mousetraps for
language learning.
Traditional Mousetraps
|
Better Mousetraps
|
# 10 Behavioral
vs. Cognitive
Competence vs. Performance
Innate (acquired) vs. Learners
|
Dynamic Systems Theory
Emergentism (This term is used to say that language
learning is like any other learning, for it emerges from the human being like
other skills emerge.)
|
# 9 Transfer
Interference
Overgeneralization
|
Embodied Cognition
(According to Brown, cognition is part of a
whole picture: body, mind and world connections. He states that it’s like
“opening up and capturing the concept of transfer, interference and overgeneralization
in a much more holistic and refreshing way for teachers”.)
|
# 8 Focal
vs. Peripheral Attention
Controlled vs. Automatic Processing
|
Form-focused
Instruction (FFI): Noticing
(The idea here is to get sts to work with the
pieces of language they learn and put them together with a whole form with
all the communicative efforts. Students need to notice the language in order
to be successful at using it.)
|
# 7 Strategy-based Instruction (SBI)
Awareness
-> Action
Autonomy
|
Self-regulation, Scaffolding
Mediation, ZPD
(This mousetrap
is about having teachers mediate the learning process that learners are
going through in the classroom and how they can work within sts’ zone of development
to keep them progressing along with awareness and action.)
|
# 6 Intrinsic Motivation
Meaningful (vs. Rote) Learning
Autonomy
|
Investment
Imagined Community
(This principle is important to remind
teachers that the perception learners have is more important than the reality
they face. As teachers, we need to help learners square their imagination to
their own reality; to the community they will be using the language with.)
|
# 5 Personality & Cognitive Styles
Anxiety, Risk-taking, Empathy
Self-esteem
|
Communities of Practice
Self-efficacy
(According to this principle, nowadays, teachers
shouldn’t look at learners as individuals who are striving to overcome their anxiety
and self-esteem, but as communities of learners. We should see our classrooms
as communities of practice and the future of the language in those
communities of practice.)
|
# 4 Community Competence
Willingness to Communicate (WTC)
|
Interaction, Collaboration
Communities of Practice
(Once again, Dr
Brown states that researchers’ theories and methodologies are showing that
learners shouldn’t be seen as individuals working alone in the world, but
people relating to other people, within communities. It’s all about the
social nature of language.)
|
# 3
Intercultural Competence
Cross-cultural Analysis
Social Distance, Optimal Distance
|
Languageculture
(With the global use
of English, in this mousetrap, the
presenter says that the concept of crossing-cultures is changing and that the
term Languaculture is being used, for it captures the notion that language
and culture are intertwined.)
|
# 2 Language Ego
Inhibition
|
Identity
(This is an extremely important principle,
for the whole notion of identity is related to the way people talk, and that
is something we can’t change. There are few things you can do to improve the
way people talk, because the way they talk is the way they are.)
|
# 1 Empowerment
Self-actualization
|
Agency
(This is the concept which Dr Brown believes
wraps it all up, for it reminds us that, in his own words, “our mission with
our students is to help them to be agents, using the language, internalizing
the language, making choices of their own, and not think of themselves as
second class citizens”.)
|
Before his closing remarks, Dr Brown
mentioned he hopes that, in a couple of years, there will be no distinction
between non-native English speakers and native English speakers, for this
distinction is something from the past. He also added that non-native English
speaker teachers who have learned English as their second (or third) language are
the most wonderful teachers that one can have, for we are agents; we have identified
ourselves in the English language.
The presenter ended his presentation
with a quote from Gandhi which says that we “must be the change we want to
see”. Douglas Brown thinks that we are becoming even more humane in the process
of being English teachers. He is also encouraged by what has been happening in
the last four decades and the directions that our profession is turning to and
the methodology that has been embracing the different identities of our
learners. For all of us there, he left the challenge of taking those principles
and making them work in our classrooms.
As for me, I left his presentation
not only feeling blessed for having the opportunity to attend it, but also with
the feeling that one of my favorite authors, who has inspired me as a
professional for more than twenty years, has shown that I have also been on the
right track by researching and trying to adapt the mousetraps to my own teaching.
*H. Douglas Brown & Heekyeong Lee are launching the fourth edition of Teaching by Principles, in early 2015.
